for more detailed explanation about video and audio settings, have a look at the proper Help section (just press F1 after you open AVStoDVD). The FAQ section can be useful as well. If you still have questions not cleared by the Help, come back to me.

@davexnet

thanks for the report, I will try to reproduce and fix that issue.

@Seeker47

you should consider to upgrade AVStoDVD from 2.3.3 to latest release (2.4.1). You will have many improvements about subs. From AVStoDVD history:

you should consider to upgrade AVStoDVD from 2.3.3 to latest release (2.4.1). You will have many improvements about subs. From AVStoDVD history:

O.K., _MrC_, I guess it's time to do that. I noticed that the version of SubtitleCreator (which looks to be a rather good program) found in your v. 2.3.3 dates from 2007. But development on this program appears to have greatly lagged, if not stalled out altogether: the most recent version shown here in the VH Tools section is an RC1 from 2008. Can't see how that would be a good thing . . . .

@davexnet
I tried your "use a .Sup version of the subs file instead" idea on just one AVS project so far -- one that had given the failure I described using the Srt file. It did process to completion, but when I played the disc (on my Oppo player) there were NO subs to be found, and then about 4 minutes in the disc froze and locked up the player, requiring it to be turned Off and then back On, to be able to eject the dvd. Thanks anyway.

Incidentally, in the midst of that prior run of subtitled projects, where 5 of them bombed out, there was another one -- again, an .Avi + .Srt, apparently similar to the others -- that came out just fine. Go figure.

When in Las Vegas, don't miss the Pinball Hall of Fame Museum http://www.pinballmuseum.org/ -- over 150 tables from 6+ decades of this gradually disappearing American art form.

Seeker47/MrC,
Interesting. Even in AVStoDVD 2.41, I have had the subs error. AVStoDVD creates the SUP file, but it bombs out anyway.

I did a test with a 7 minute clip (and 7 minute subs) I created the SUP separately as I mentioned before,
ran through the DVD creation and viewed it with Powerdvd on my PC. It seemed fine, not sure why you got the issue you had.
In theory, it should be fine - adding a SUP instead of SRT is legitimate. Is your SRT bad ?
Perhaps Mrc, can comment some more.

Mr. C - I love this program, gorgeous video, but having a problem with menu creation using 2.4.1. When I click Menu Wizard I get these error messages:
Error 383 'Text' property is read-only
(I click ok)
Error 11 - division by zero
(I click ok)
The Wizard window opens
I click Run Editor
Run-time error 91: object variable or with block variable not set

Sometimes I also get and error saying "MenuPage1.bmp cannot be found or is invalid." It's looking in the path I put in preferences for the temp directory. The path is to a thumb drive, where I set all paths in preferences.

To fix what look like VB errors, I downloaded and ran vbrun60sp6.exe and added mscomctl.ocx to the program's lib file and registered it (had been in system32). This didn't help.

I haven't attached a log file, as after failing to create a menu, I closed the program, opened it again and created a DVD with no menu.

yes, your workaround is surely useful: SubtitlesCreator GUI may catch some SRT errors (and give a feedback) while the CLI version does not. When converting SRT to SUP just be sure to use the correct settings/profiles to properly format the subs.

@ellentk

have you always got this error or is it come out recently? In other words, could you use the Menu Wizard in the past? If you could, probably AVStoDVD registry key is messed up: open regedit, find HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\AVStoDVD and delete it.

O.K., I've followed your recommendation, uninstalling v. 2.3.3 (and its components) and installing v. 2.4.1. So far, I've only tried 3 project attempts with it, including one that had bombed out at the subs encoding phase a couple times (despite different settings) under 2.3.3. In each of these 2.4.1 trials, the same thing happened with the various .Avi sources. I never even got as far as the subs encoding phase. In each case, AVStoDVD gave me a video encoding halt message, stating that the video was shorter than expected, but did I want to continue anyway ? In one case, it said the video was something like 36 minutes long, rather than the supposed 1 hour 46 minute running time ! Three different sources in a row, chosen at random. Quite frankly, I just do not believe this"error" message! If I play these videos in VLC or WMP_HC, it shows the full running times as expected, and appears to be willing to play each from end to end. One of them has already gone through CX2D, reporting the full running time, although it only half-fills the disc, which means poor bitrate and poor PQ for a result, because the CX2D encoder &/or encoding algorithm sucks. (I've heard the apologies some on VH forum have made for what CX2D does, but I don't believe those either.)

Anyway, either I have something set up wrong, or there is some other problem. I hardly ever saw this issue with v. 2.3.3. I'm curious to see what might happen if I ever get as far as the Menu Wizard in this current version. Contrary to a recent report in this thread, that is one thing I had zero problems with in my older version.

The one thing I haven't tried yet in v. 2.4.1 is a source that has nosubs, and I'm about to try that next. If I get another running time disparity in the video encoding, well, that is just very unlikely to be a coincidence, if you're asking me.

When in Las Vegas, don't miss the Pinball Hall of Fame Museum http://www.pinballmuseum.org/ -- over 150 tables from 6+ decades of this gradually disappearing American art form.

Even better: do you have the possibility to upload somewhere (i.e. mediafire.com) the avi and srt files you are trying to convert?

Bye

Hi _MrC_,

Would existing download links work for you, from Filesonic, RS, or one of the others ? That would save me a couple steps. I can PM them to you. I'll check to confirm they are still good, and do not require any membership (premium or otherwise), before doing so.

When in Las Vegas, don't miss the Pinball Hall of Fame Museum http://www.pinballmuseum.org/ -- over 150 tables from 6+ decades of this gradually disappearing American art form.

O.K., here's an early update on the situation I was having with the subs, first with v. 2.3.3 and then continuing after I upgraded to v. 2.4.1. Many thanks to _MrC_ for his replies and troubleshooting offline.

Much as _MrC_ surmised, it is looking like this may have been some codecs conflict issue. I discovered Pixiepack on this system, one of the various "leftovers" installed (without my being aware of it) by Audials One, when I briefly tried that program. Audials is long gone at this point, but some of its pieces tend to linger. Some reports I saw said that Pixie Codec Pack -- which was needed by Audials -- is or includes a variant of FFDshow. Hence the conflict. I uninstalled it with Revo.

Since then, I have run a few projects, including some that AVS had crashed on previously. One used a .Sup file converted from .Srt, provided by _MrC_. (A trial like this had failed to work, prior to the removal of PixiePack.) Another used the original .Srt file, which had previously failed on different attempts where project settings had been adjusted in various ways. Now, with the removal of Pixiepack, these runs are going to completion, and are encoding the subs. Hopefully this will continue. (I still have much to learn about time adjustment, for better syncing of the subs to dialog.)

I still don't see where the right FFDshow resides, but I presume it must be there -- somewhere -- or else I would not be able to process some of these video files ? One message I read on another forum mentioned the file FF_vfw.dll, but I don't find that file in \Windows\System32. (_MrC_, I'm afraid I don't follow what you were trying to tell me about GraphEdit . . . . )

[. . . and then, an interesting experiment]

I realized I was wasting a lot of blank media -- particularly the Verbatim DLs that cost many times what the SL blanks do. And a lot of these movies or videos are not what you would call "keepers." Then I remembered that I had this WD Live gizmo that I had not even taken out of the box. (The manual for this thing runs to 180 pages, and that always seems off-putting to me.) So, I was wondering if you could copy a whole DVD structure to the portable HDD used by the WD Live, and play that. Or have subtitles for this. It turns out that you can . . . although certain convenience features are lacking with WD Live, such as properly respecting directory names for film titles, to make navigation something other than guesswork. But I have now watched a couple movies this way, and then erased them to free up the space afterward. I can still use AVStoDVD to convert the source file(s) to DVD structure, with encoding of subs as needed. (It may be possible just to have an .SRT file present, in the same place, but I need to try that out.)

[In case any thread reader may be wondering, this mostly has to do with titles that are not available here. You would be amazed at how much stuff is very rare or out of print -- if it ever was available here. If I could rent or stream something from Netflix, or catch it on cable, natural laziness would prevail and I would just do that. Tracking things down on the net and going through all this rigamarole is a last resort.]

One thing I'm still puzzling over with this: It appears to me that the video of the AVStoDVD-made DVD structure (at SL or DL sizes), looks appreciably better -- played this way -- than if I just directly played the source files, which tend to be 700 - 900M .Avi files, or 1.5G .Mkv files. But I was under the impression that processing was not going to improve the look of a video source (the resolution you had is as good as it's ever going to be), particularly if there is any re-encoding involved ?

When in Las Vegas, don't miss the Pinball Hall of Fame Museum http://www.pinballmuseum.org/ -- over 150 tables from 6+ decades of this gradually disappearing American art form.

Mike, the program does this automatically by using DGpulldown to create a frame rate of 29.97 from 25 fps actual frames.

Thanks,
That works. Somehow I thought the conversion process would be more complex.

For example, why not use 23.976 fps with 2:3 pulldown for NTSC?

I thought when 24.000 fps film is converted to 25.000 fps PAL that the film is sped up with the resulting video playing back about 4% faster but most people do not notice the difference. And also that 24.000 fps film is played back at 23.976 fps & then uses pulldown when converted to NTSC.

Why not just slow down the 25.000 fps PAL to 23.976 fps and use pulldown? Wouldn’t that make it almost like playing the original 24.000 fps film at 23.976 fps before applying pulldown & converting to NTSC ?

I’m not challenging anyone, I just want to understand how all this works.
Curious Mike

Your understanding is correct, in fact I've done it manually, as I'm sure many others have.
At the end of the day, I found it was better to leave them as PAL and let my playback device do the conversion.

No reason AVStoDVD couldn't do this, but it's not part of it's repertoire at the moment.
Of course, it would have to slow the audio to match.

Pulling down a 23.976 fps based footage to 25 fps creates a quite visibile stuttering motion, while pulling down 25 to 29.97 is much more smooth. That's why I have implemented only the NTSC-film to PAL speedup. Keep in mind that speedup (or speeddown) conversion alters the original video/audio footage. Nowadays I would suggest to keep PAL as PAL and NTSC as NTSC, since most new players support both standards.

Pulling down a 23.976 fps based footage to 25 fps creates a quite visibile stuttering motion, while pulling down 25 to 29.97 is much more smooth. That's why I have implemented only the NTSC-film to PAL speedup. Keep in mind that speedup (or speeddown) conversion alters the original video/audio footage. Nowadays I would suggest to keep PAL as PAL and NTSC as NTSC, since most new players support both standards.

Bye

My year old Blu-ray player cannot play a PAL DVD that someone gave to me, & neither can my few year old DVD recorder/player.

On a previous project I had some 23.975 flash videos & it was suggested I keep that frame rate & use pulldown in order to achieve the 29.97 fps. That if I converted to 29.97 fps this would create field blending issues, or something like that.

That's when I thought perhaps reversing things and converting the 25 fps PAL back to the original 24 fps film rate might be a way to start from the beginning. I can play this PAL DVD on my PC but it has a lot of field blending problems, at least that is the way I would describe it.

Maybe I should get a cheap DVD player that can play PAL. But I'm presuming I would still see the same field blending problems.

Maybe I should get a cheap DVD player that can play PAL. But I'm presuming I would still see the same field blending problems.

Not necessarily blending. Often the frames are just dropped or repeated.
I have a player that does PAL > NTSC conversion, and I find it quite acceptable.
I don't have to concern myself with this type of conversion anymore.

I'm not having any actual faults with the software, but I've found that the default adaptive quantization setting of 1 for HC as installed doesn't work so well. There's a lot of pixelation in dark parts with lower bitrate files. I changed the default to 4 and the results are way better.

What I'm not sure about is if that could cause any potential problems with playback. Never had them myself but I'm not positive it couldn't happen.

I suppose I could study HC Enc more but for me the whole point of using front ends like AVStoDVD is that I don't just want to go to the trouble. I don't really want to be a digital video geek. Too many sort of standards. You'd have to pay me. I'd much rather be a digital audio geek.

Regarding this, "I suppose I could study HC Enc more but for me the whole point of using front ends like AVStoDVD is that I don't just want to go to the trouble." - You will have to go to some trouble if you really want to optimize the results, there's just no way around it.

It's impossible for AVStoDVD to know the optimum AQ and Lumgain settings on a clip by clip basis.

I cant seem to hear any sound when I try to convert a .mkv file that has AC3 640kbps + DTS 1510kbps. When I choose the .mkv file, it asks which audio I would like to demux. It doesn't matter which one I choose, when I preview, The picture is great but I cant hear anything. Could someone help me with this? Is their some tweaking that I need to do?